Tag: Communication strategy

The printing press constituted a true revolution in communication. But what really happened as a wider consequence of that revolution? Let’s try to reconstruct the circumstances that preceded printing. We know that there was a strong, although very divergent scribal culture before the printing press. The cultural texture was quite thin outside monasteries, libraries, and cities such as Bologna. That led to a heavy reliance on the vocal transmission of information, on storytelling.

The information culture was half-spoken, half-written.

The influence of the scribe was greatly enhanced because of a complementary character, the copyist. At first, the shift from script to print produced a social culture that was not very different from the culture produced by scribes. The writer – printer process was not very different from the scribe – copyist process, if looked at from the outside. Of course there was a huge increase in the output of books and a drastic reduction in the man-hours required to turn them out.

The first change was a remarkable increase in productivity. But then, the communications revolution of print caused remarkable changes in information-related practices that led to even wider social changes.

The well-informed man had to spend a part of each day in temporary isolation from his fellow men – reading. Another development was the Sunday papers replacing church going. Sermons used to be coupled with news about local and foreign affairs. The new media players handled news gathering and circulation logistics much more efficiently.

The most noteworthy social change took place on the community level. To hear, you have to come together. To read encourages you to draw apart. The notion that a society can be regarded as a bundle of discrete units supported the principle that detached people can be represented through a system of disconnected political parties. The reading public was very different from the one before. It was not only dispersed, it was very atomistic and individualistic. As a result, the present political system was born.

Learning, which used to take place through vocal interaction in groups, was now the activity of a solitary, independent individual. The picture of the student in the library reading room was transferred to classrooms and the architectures of education.

According to some researchers, print silenced the spoken word. The orators of Rome gave way to the men of letters. Written text was now about facts and talk was cheap.

From this point on, people have tended to see information and communication technologies as two separate domains, not only for technological reasons, but because of the historical developments described above.

We are again going through another revolution in communication. The way the written word is used on Twitter or on Facebook is much closer to the vocal transmission of information than to writing. Through closely combining communication and information technologies, we are creating a much richer cognitive tapestry than the present separate ICT-systems are capable of. Second, instead of drawing apart, we can now come (digitally) together. The culture is again half-spoken, half-written. The printing press separated information and communication. The Internet and the new social technologies are causing the two to converge.

The first change is again a remarkable increase in productivity, but again, it does not end there. The real promise of the Internet is in the new information-related practices and the social innovations that are still ahead of us.

For most of human history, creativity was held to be a privilege of supreme beings, initially, the gods who shaped the heavens and the earth, and then it was extraordinary human beings who were the creators and not the helpless, dependent subjects of the wrath of the gods. We switched our views further as we began to understand more how the world worked. Whether this has helped the human race is debatable. But it would help us if we realized the responsibility that comes with our new role.

Our future is tied to human creativity.

You would think that given its importance, creativity would have a very high priority among our concerns, but we face a disturbing reality if we look at what is really going on today. The arts are seen as unessential luxuries and instead of exploring creative new solutions, cutting expenses is the approach of most managers trying to deal with global competition.

What holds true for the arts and the economy, also applies to education. The models of mass society and mass production still prevail in the world of mass education. The industrial society is re-born daily at the expense of a different sociocultural context that would embrace creativity.

The sociocultural context matters because creativity is a systemic rather than an individual phenomenon. Workable new solutions to our most pressing concerns will not appear by themselves as isolated ideas of independent people. Creativity is born in connections and in enriching interaction.

To say that Thomas Edison invented electricity or that Albert Einstein discovered relativity is a popular, but misleading simplification. These breakthroughs would have been inconceivable without (1) the social and intellectual network that stimulated and advanced their thinking and (2) the people who recognized the value of their contributions and spread them further. A good, new idea is not automatically passed on. From this standpoint a lighted match does not cause a fire. Rather the fire took place because of a particular combination of elements of which the lighted match was one. One cannot be creative alone. These qualities are co-created in an active process of mutual recognition.

The creative era is about interdependence, not about superhuman individuals.

An inspiring person is only inspiring by virtue of others who treat her this way. A good decision is only good if there are people around to agree with it. It is not enough to look at the individuals who seem to be responsible for a new idea. Their contribution, although important, is always a node in a network and a phase in a movement of thought. Creativity takes place in connections and communication. The network is the enabler and amplifier. It is time now for a new epistemology; new ways of talking about knowledge creation.

However, people have always networked. Scholars depended heavily on correspondence networks for the exchange of ideas before the time of the universities. These communities, known as the “Republic of Letters” were the social media of the era, and resembled the communication patterns of today astonishingly closely. The better-networked scientist was often the better scientist. Today, the better-networked knowledge worker is usually the better worker. In the future, the better-networked student will always be the better student.

The main difference from the time of letters and the printing press is the transformative efficiency of our new interaction tools. A “man of letters” may today be a man of tweets, posts and updates, but the principle is the same: what matters most is the way we are skillfully present and communicate using all the different means that are available.

Mutually recognizing and mutually supporting relationships are the core of creative progress and growth.

To be human means communicative interaction. Creativity is an emergent pattern of that interaction.

New technologies give an organization the ability to reconfigure its form any way it desires. We are not confined to any one structure any more. The mobile revolution has changed the logic of the network. The Internet is no longer about linked pages but connected purposes. We want to do something – with the help of information and other people.

For optimizing information the best structure for a social business would be a random network. A random network has the shortest possible number of steps between any nodes. An example of this is performing a Google search. The key measure here is the path length. That indicates how far away from each other everybody is, on average. The path length measures how many steps a piece of information has to go through between people. To create short path lengths in a typical hierarchical or process based structure you would need to know almost everything and everybody included in the organizational chart. You would need to have access to information that we typically don’t have in an organization of any size. Hierarchies and processes are thus not efficient ways to organize information based work. They are not transparent enough creating slowness and inefficiency. As a random network is not the easiest mental benchmark for an organization that wants to develop its information- and communication-related practices, another model has emerged to shorten the path lengths between people and information.

It is social filtering, curation.

There are very few isolated geniuses. But there are many bright people who have continued and improved the work of others. Capable people have capable predecessors, people who act as filters connecting people and high quality information. The key concept in the knowledge-based future is acknowledgment of the importance of these messengers beyond what we have been used to so far.

Social filtering, curation, is the new search.

In a sense, creative people are more remixers of other peoples’ ideas than inventors. Technology and development are not isolated acts by independent thinkers, but a complex storyline, where the storytellers and curators, are more important than the heroic inventors, if there ever were any.

We never know how the story will develop, but it cannot develop unless it continues. The new challenge for the creative economy is to understand the importance of attribution and giving credit. The first thing is to acknowledge the vital role of social filtering and the huge importance of the retweet.

Our attention is a result of the filters we use. These filters can be a mix of habits, company processes, organizational charts or tools. Increasingly these filters are social. They are the people we recognize. Our most valuable guides to useful bits of insight are trusted people whose activities we can follow in real time to help us enrich our views.

In mainstream thinking, managers are understood as the prime originators of what happens in their businesses. The central concern is how the active manager/subject gets the passive follower/object to act in ways that reflect the manager’s perspective. Management continues to see communication in terms of influence and manipulation.

The social business view sees relations and communication as conversational processes of meaning making. It is a movement of thought on the basis of multiple perspectives that you invite or you pull. A person, when networking, would be subscribing to contextually relevant topics and people. Push transforms to pull.

Interaction starts with recognition. It is about granting attention to people and information and making room for them in our lives. Leading and following in the traditional corporate sense have seen the leader making people follow him through motivation and rewards. The leader also decided who the followers should be.

When seen through the logic of social business and social tools, leading and following have a very different dynamic. Leading in this new business sense is not position-based, but recognition-based. People, the followers, decide who to follow and what topics to follow. You pull information from someone you trust to be at the forefront in an area, which is temporarily meaningful for you.

Another huge difference from traditional management thinking is that because of the diversity of contexts people link to, there can never be just one source of information. Thus, an individual always has many topics and people that she follows. You might even claim that from the point of view taken here, it is highly problematic if a person only has one “leader”. It would mean attention blindness as a default state.

Pull communication is at best a process of active following, creative learning through observing and simulating desired practices. Leading on the other hand, is doing one’s work in a transparent, inspiring and reflective way.

Two distinct modes of communication have emerged and spread since the invention of the telegraph. The first mode was private point-to-point communication that was meant to connect individuals. The second mode was the public broadcasting of content. These two approaches to communication were advanced significantly by a series of innovations resulting in media technologies being perhaps the most socially disruptive developments of our time, but the basic division into the two modes has remained essentially the same.

But now, a new form of communication in the digital, networked world combines broadcasting and point-to-point, creating a third mode of communication.

In its most basic form, what I call private broadcasting, involves a three-part relationship: (1) an initial broadcast gesture from one individual, leaving free the matter of who in the audience acts on the gesture, (2) a voluntary, active response to that gesture by another, and (3) resulting connectivity and activity. Here, the model differs from both the private point-to-point logic and the public broadcasting logic.

The biggest change, however, is in the role of the audience. The passive audience view suggested that the media influences people easily. This is why broadcasting has been the domain of politicians and marketers. The active audience view, that is behind the third mode of communication, thinks that people make active decisions about how to aggregate, and when to interact.

In contrast to the earlier mass era thinking, the society is seen as consisting of numerous differentiated communities, each with its own values and interests. All media content is interpreted within the community according to social sense making within the group. The individuals are influenced more by their peers than by the media.

The mass society theories of marketing subscribed to a passive view of the audience and public broadcasting. It is time now to subscribe to an active, responsive notion of the audience and the possibility for true interaction. The audience for this new form of communication are the emerging, active communities that the individual or the company wants to reach and connect with.

The public access that the Internet now allows people to have is mistakenly believed to mean trying to get the broadest possible audience. There has been a tremendous increase in the amount of content that is available to the public, but not really intended for the public. Instead, these materials are meant for the emerging conversations and communities, changing the way we learn and changing our sense of belonging.

Private broadcasting means a new way of connecting. It is successful if it creates a conversation, and very successful if it helps to build a community.

In a typical large organization everybody is a long way away from everybody else. As a result the individual perception of the world is narrow and confined to a small group of immediate acquaintances.

That did not matter in factory-type of settings because physical tasks could be broken up. Bigger tasks could be divided by assigning people to different, smaller, fairly independent parts of the whole. Hierarchies made sense as a way to modularize work. The worker did not need to communicate with many people. The downside was a lack of flexibility. Reconfiguring a hierarchy always created a mess for a long time. And if you had a lot of interaction going on in a hierarchical structure, with many steps going up and down, it was slow and prone to misunderstandings.

For intellectual tasks, it is much harder to find parts that make for an efficient division of labor. Intellectual tasks are by default linked and complex creating an increased need to interact. Knowledge workers are often put in a position where they have to negotiate some understanding of what they face. The same event means different things to different people. The cognitive opportunity lies in the fact that as we don’t all select the same things, we don’t all miss the same things. If we can pool our insights in a creative, enriching way we can thrive in the complex world we live in.

New technologies give an organization the ability to reconfigure its form any way it desires. We are not confined to any one structure any more. The smartphone revolution has changed the logic of the network. The Web is no longer about linked pages but about connected purposes. We want to do something – with the help of information and other people. Often this means wanting to learn and respond in a situation.

Most often we seek two things: information and interaction.

For information the best structure would be a random, contextual network. A random network has the shortest possible path lengths. An example of this is performing a search. The key measure here is path length. That indicates how far everybody is, on average. The path length measures how many steps a piece of information has to go through between people. To create short path lengths in a typical hierarchical or process based structure you would need to know almost everything and everybody included in the hierarchy/process chart. You would need to have access to information that we typically don’t have. Hierarchies and process charts are thus not efficient ways to organize knowledge work. They are not transparent enough.

For interaction, the challenge is engagement. Widening the circle of involvement means expanding who gets to participate. It is about inviting and including relevant, new and different voices. The measure is built on the social graph: how many of your friends know each other?

The network design principles successful organizations follow are: ( 1 ) shortening the distance between two randomly picked files/nodes/people; ( 2 ) getting more people who you know personally, to know each other.

Physical tasks can normally be broken up in a reductionist way. Bigger tasks can be divided by assigning people to different smaller parts of the whole. For intellectual tasks, it is much harder to find parts that make for an efficient division of labour. Intellectual tasks are by default linked and complex. Reductionism does not work.

The machine metaphor led to the belief that if we only can arrange the parts in the right way, we optimize efficiency. When the image of work was the assembly line, work could be fragmented and individual performance goals could be set for each worker. The world was all about little boxes separated from one another.

The demands of work are different now: how efficient an organization is reflects the links people have with one another and the links they have to the contexts of value. How many handshakes separates them from one another and from the things that matter? We are beginning to see the world as relations.

When we talk about relations, we often take examples from nature: murmuration and bird flocks. The V shape of a bird flock does not result from one bird being selected as the leader, and the other birds lining up behind the leader. Instead, each bird’s behaviour is based on its position relative to nearby birds. Ornithologists say that the V shape is not planned or centrally determined; it emerges out of simple, and relatively few, rules of interaction. The bird flock demonstrates a striking feature of emergent phenomena. But the birds do not need to figure out the rules of flight that guide how they organize themselves. These rules are genetically hardwired. Nature provides this for the birds. Birds then are not “free like birds”.

When it comes to people it is a different story. Mother nature does not provide deterministic rules for collaboration. We are free to choose, or not to choose, our own ways of doing things together. Accordingly we are ourselves responsible for formulating the principles we use to organize our life. Social systems are thus fundamentally different from natural mechanisms.

We have examples of social architectures that redefine some basic beliefs about social systems.

The wiki is at the moment the best departure from division of labor and workflows. Wikis let people work digitally together the very same way they would work face-to-face. In a physical meeting, there are always more or less the wrong people present and the transaction costs are very high. Unlike email, which pushes copies of the same information to people to work or edit separately, a wiki pulls non co-located people together to work collaboratively, and with very low transaction costs. Email and physical meetings are excluding ways of doing things. They leave people out. A wiki (depending on the topic, the context) is always inviting and including. The goal is to enable groups to form around shared contexts without preset organizational walls, or rules of engagement.

Ward Cunningham described his invention in 1995 as the simplest online database that could possibly work. An important principle of the wiki is the conscious emphasis on using as little structure as possible to get the job done. A wiki does not force hierarchy on the people. In this case, less structure and less hierarchy mean less transaction costs. A wiki always starts out flat, with all the pages on the same level. This allows people to dynamically create the organization and hierarchy that makes most sense in the situation at hand to get the job done.

People work together to reach a balance of different viewpoints through interaction as they iterate the content of work. The wiki way of working is essentially the digital and more advanced version of a meeting or a workshop. It enables multiple people to inhabit the same space, see the same thing and participate freely. Some might just listen, some make comments or a small edits, while others might make more significant contributions and conclusions.

New work is about responsive, free and voluntary participation by people who contribute as little, or as much as they like, and who are motivated by something much more elusive than only money. The society has moved away from the era of boxes to the time of networks and linked individualism. Being connected to people – from elsewhere – is a cultural necessity and links, not boxes, are the new texture of value creation.

People often need to act and make decisions in situations in which causality is poorly understood, where there is considerable uncertainty and people hold different beliefs and have personal biases. However, people very reluctantly acknowledge that they face ambiguity at work. Problems in organizations tend to get labeled as lack of information. It feels more professional to try to solve a knowledge management problem that is called lack of information than a problem that is called confusion.

Knowledge workers are often put in a position where they have to negotiate some understanding of what they face. The same event means different things to different people and just getting more information will not help them. What will help is a setting where they could negotiate and construct fresh ideas that would include their multiple interpretations of what they experience. The challenge is that managers often treat the existence of multiple views as a symptom of a weakness rather that as an accurate and needed barometer of uncertainty.

A mix of stimuli always surrounds people. The stimuli have no meaning apart from what the individuals make of it. In other words, the environment is a product of the persons, not something outside of them. People are selective in what they attend to in any situation and what is attended to become the environment. The reality is not an objective set of arrangements outside us, but is continually constructed in daily interaction.

If people want to create shared meaning, they need to talk about their experience in close proximity to its occurrence and have a common platform for conversation. They need to see their different views about the experience as richness and a prerequisite to learn what is going on.

Because any information can mean a variety of things, meaning cannot simply be discovered. Information does not help. We have to talk! Many meetings that are directed at the problems of ambiguity fail to handle it because potentially rich views are silenced by autocratic leadership, norms that encourage harmony or reluctance to admit that one has no idea what is going on.

A crucial property of creative work is that situations are progressively clarified in iterative interaction. Our reality is an ongoing accomplishment that takes form when people together make sense of the situations in which they find themselves.

Therefore our own joint sense-making actions are the determinants of the meaning that situations have. They are the true contents of our learning and development. Quoting Max Planck: “When we change the way we look at things, the things we look at change.”

We need management thinking that puts creativity at the center of the wealth-creating process. The knowledge-based, learning-intensive firm does not behave in the way our dominant, industrial management thinking assumes. But we lack an alternative theoretical lens. What if we used the Internet as a lens for sense-making?

Organizations are always assemblies of interacting people. The reason for an organization to exist is to simplify, support, and enrich interaction. That is what the Internet does.

However, not all corporate interaction is the same. There are three types of tasks depending on the amount of communication needed and the alternative mechanisms of coordination. The different task inter-dependencies accordingly place different and increasing burdens on interactive capability.

I call these different tasks (1) independent, (2) dependent and (3) interdependent.

Two tasks are independent if they don’t affect each other. The most important communication exists between the employer and the employee, the manager and the worker, or in craftwork between the customer and the craftsman. The execution of two independent tasks does not require communication between the tasks. The corporate architecture consists of black boxes that are not coupled directly but in an indirect way by managers who coordinate the work.

The factory process is sequential. Being dependent means that the output of one task is the input of another. The reverse cannot normally take place. In sequential dependence, those performing the following task must comply with the constraints imposed by the execution of the preceding task. Since the hierarchy is clear, the coordination is mostly about measuring and controlling whether the execution conforms to the planned requirements. The corporate architecture consists of tightly coupled tasks and predetermined processes. Work as “communication” is one-way.

Two tasks are interdependent if they affect each another mutually and in parallel. Interdependent tasks call for responsiveness and coordination by mutual adjustments. The circumstances affecting the execution cannot be fully determined and predicted in advance. Most of the information that is relevant to the situation will be discovered and created during the execution of the task. As a result it is not possible to agree on a coherent approach in advance. Work is learning.

Individuals and tasks must be transparent and must communicate on an ongoing basis to let each other responsively identify feasible approaches. They must communicate information the very moment it is created in order to develop common understanding, an information commons. This makes a fundamental change to our approach to information objects. The basic unit of corporate information is not content in the form of documents but interaction in the form of conversations based on context awareness. Knowledge creation is here understood as an active process of communication. Knowledge is not stored, but is perpetually constructed in interaction.

Knowledge is not transmitted from one individual to another but is the process of relating: one approach in the situation may be optimal from one point of view; another may be preferable from another. Responsive task interdependence always works with and negotiates differences in a creative context. Success is based on emergent and parallel responsiveness.

Architectures differ in the degree to which their components are loosely or tightly coupled. Coupling is a measure of the degree to which communication between the components is predetermined and fixed or not.

The architecture of the Internet is based on loose couplings and modularity. Modularity is the design principle that intentionally makes nodes of the network able to be highly responsive. The Internet-based firm sees work and cognitive capability as networked communication. Any node in the network should be able to communicate with any other node on the basis of contextual interdependence and creative participative engagement. Work takes place in a transparent, wide-area, digital environment.

As organizations want to be more creative and knowledge-based, the focus of management thinking should shift towards understanding participative, self-organizing responsiveness.

The Internet is a viable model for making sense of the value creating constellations of tomorrow.

Communication constitutes reality. Communication is said to be the primary process by which human life is experienced: how we communicate creates and forms our experiences. Accordingly social life consists of dynamic interaction processes rather than stable structures. Therefore the way we communicate is of great interest. Where then do our communication-related habits come from?

We saw communication as a process of senders and receivers. The mass audience was seen as passive receivers and easily influenced by the media. The audience today is very different. Individuals have access to modes of communication that, just a few years ago, were available only for people working inside media channels. Most importantly the mathematical theory of communication, the concept of senders and receivers is not only unhelpful, but has been proven to be plain wrong in human communication!

Two distinct modes of communication have emerged and spread since the invention of the telegraph. The first mode was private point-to-point communication that was meant to connect people. The original telegraph was the classic example. It’s more developed form, the telephone, made synchronous communication between individuals on a global scale one of the defining technologies of the modern society.

The second mode was the public broadcasting of content. These two approaches to communication were advanced significantly by a series of innovations resulting in media technologies being perhaps the most socially disruptive developments of the past century, but the basic division into the two modes of private point-to-point and public broadcasting has remained essentially the same until now.

Thomas Edison filed a patent claim in the autumn of 1888 for a device, which, according to him “does for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear.” The kinetoscope as it was called, carried a long spiral of tiny images that could be viewed in a moving sequence by turning a crank and peering through a magnifying glass. Edison’s vision of this new technology was quite quickly taken over by people who saw motion pictures not as a personal experience but as a publicly broadcasted mass media.

In the US the primary financing for radio and TV broadcast stations came very quickly from airtime used for advertising. In other countries, different models emerged. In Europe radio/TV was funded largely through license fees paid by radio/TV set owners. This model was grounded in the belief that radio/TV is a political voice that should serve the interest of the “people” and not the interest of making a profit.

The broadcasting model of communication was now turned into the property of either advertisers or politicians.

This was because of the inherited way of thinking about people’s actions. We have two major ways of understanding why people behave the way they do. On the one hand, there is the causal explanation. People change because of external forces. People can be influenced, educated, motivated or even forced to change their behaviour. This is the causal thinking of mainstream management theory: I send you a message and you act. I steer you and your use of time.

On the other hand, there is the assumption of agency based on response-ability and responsiveness. Instead of seeing the audience as an undifferentiated, passive mass, we understand the audience as a network of people, forming small groups and larger communities. The commercial and political interest to broadcasting was a result from the belief that the media can mold masses. In contrast to earlier thinking, the society is today seen to consist of numerous differentiated communities, each with own values and interests. All media content is interpreted within the community according to social sense making within the group. The individuals are influenced more by their peers than by media. Meaning is not in the message, but is produced in interaction. Different people will understand what they view and read in very different ways.

A new, third form of communication in the digital, networked world combines broadcasting and point-to-point. The means of broadcasting are today available for individual people. They are not only the property of institutions. The audience for this new form of private broadcasting is not a passive mass, but the emerging, active communities that the individual wants to reach and connect with.

In it’s most basic form, responsive communication involves a three-part relationship: an initial broadcasted gesture from one individual, leaving it free who in the audience acts on the gesture, a voluntary response to that gesture by another, and resulting crowdsourced activity. Meaning here does not reside solely in any one of these parts but in the relationship of all three.

The passive audience view suggested that people are easily influenced by the media. The active audience view thinks that people make active decisions about how to aggregate, and how to respond. The mass society theories subscribed to the passive conception of the audience and public broadcasting. It is time now to subscribe to an active, responsive notion of the audience and the possibility of private broadcasting.